Category: Media

CHALLENGE

In April 2017, Chicago Tribune confidently declared in its film review: “adults not particularly interested in ‘The Fate of the Furious’ can re-enter a movie theatre with confidence”. They were talking about the film, ‘Norman’.

While Hollywood continued to churn out blockbusters with all flash and minimal substance, along came a refreshing alternative for cinemagoers. Meet ‘Norman’, an indie movie that provides a fascinating character study of a New York fixer that’s part thriller, satire, and tragedy.

We were tasked by the indie film distributor, BFG (Becker Film Group) with developing a 2-week digital marketing campaign to promote the film one week before and after its release date on May 25th, 2017.

For the movie, we needed to increase awareness and trailer views. For BFG, we needed to boost website traffic and increase engagement on its social media channels.

Despite Norman’s star-studded cast including Richard Gere, Steve Buscemi and Charlotte Gainsbourg, promoting the film wasn’t easy. Jewish archetypes and politics feature prominently – in other words, the film had niche appeal.

Our challenge was to reach a Jewish audience without alienating everyone else.

SOLUTION

In order to maximise our audience reach, we segmented our audience group based on their interests, preferences and behaviours and carefully targeted them with different messaging:

– We leveraged the strong cast and built credibility through positive reception from film critics.

– We targeted people’s interest in similar content with hashtags reaching a larger audience and boosting content engagement.

– As we were not able to directly target people by their religion, we created messaging that would resonate with the Jewish community.

– We also targeted people’s interest in business and politics.

All of this was employed through a mix of paid and organic posts on social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Twitter.

Amplifying Norman

Seeing that the main character Norman is a social connector in the movie, we used this theme as inspiration for a social media competition where people were asked to nominate a friend they’d like to see the film with. Naturally, many people tagged their friend in their entries, thus spreading awareness of the film to a wider audience. 5 lucky winners each scored 2 tickets to enjoy the film with their chosen friend.

THE CHALLENGE

On 20 February 2016 Fiji was hit by the biggest storm in the country’s history, Cyclone Winston. In the wake of Cyclone Winston, visitor arrivals to Fiji plummeted. Tourism Fiji needed a market-ready campaign to counteract the negative media that was making people nervous about travelling to Fiji and cancelling their holidays.

THE SOLUTION

The most authentic and believable way to show that Cyclone Winston hadn’t affected some parts of Fiji was to publish real-time images of unaffected areas of Fiji and the fastest way to get this to market was Social Media. We immediately launched the #Fijinow hashtag encouraging people on the ground in Fiji to become our content creators and share imagery. Circul8 created a tagline ‘Bula As Usual’ to echo the bula spirit of the Fijian people during this recovery time.

We lined up a group of social media influencers with a global following of over 1.3 million to travel to Fiji and share their experiences in real-time. Our influencers were tasked with demonstrating to their followers around the world on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & Snapchat that “This is Fiji Now”, it’s “Bula as Usual” and Fiji had recovered quickly and many resorts had returned to normal. The influencers also promoted our campaign hashtag.

Circul8 set up a bespoke version of our custom content aggregation tool, Aggreg8, to feature as a campaign hub on the official Tourism Fiji website and dynamically show a live updated feed of images directly from our influencers in Fiji and other travellers using the hashtag #fijinow.

THE CHANGE

– The #FijiNow campaign restored consumer confidence to book a holiday to Fiji.

– Fiji visitor arrivals are at record levels in 2016 with a 4.8% increase in visitors in August 2016.

THE CHALLENGE
Women around the world cannot choose how they live their life. Amnesty International Australia wanted more women aged 18-24 to know about their work in this area – particularly the plight of women in Afghanistan.

THE SOLUTION
We took Amnesty’s message where none had taken it before, where the freedom to choose happens all the time: social discovery app, Tinder.

Our Tinder Takeover campaign was a world-first. Launching on International Women’s Day 2014, the campaign used the online dating profiles of Tinder to increase awareness of women’s rights by displaying hard-hitting messaging such as, “Not all women have the power to choose like you do”, in Tinder profiles.

The Tinder account directed users to a cutting-edge, fully-responsive HTML5 campaign site that extended the conversation around ‘choice’. The site detailed the rights abuses many women face as well as the work Amnesty does to stand up for them, and encouraged users to sign up and show support.

THE CHANGE
Thousands chose to listen. The campaign’s mix innovative approach to highlight an important issue caught the eye of global media (including The Telegraph and The Guardian) as well as countless tech/human rights blogs.

“We went out with an open brief and were prepared to take a risk. Circul8 delivered a really original concept. We certainly learnt through this successful experiment: if you want innovation you need to provide and leave room for creativity.” – Caroline Easter, Amnesty International Australia (in The Guardian)

CHALLENGE

We were tasked with a complete rebuild of the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) website to bring in line with digital best practices, align better with core brand values and communicate more effectively with the need states of end users.

SOLUTION

We took direct inspiration from JNTO’s brand slogan of “Endless Discovery” and embodied this concept through the information heirachy, graphic design, tone of voice and user interface design of the site.

In practice, this was executed through an endless side scrolling configurable content feed at the top of the website showing all content from the site and then an endless user generated feed of images from social media at the bottom of the page using Circul8’s bespoke social content streaming software, Aggreg8.

RESULT

JNTO now have a fully brand aligned and responsive owned web channel that allows them to communicate more effectively with the Australian market.

This was launched in conjunction with social media management and a campaign, “The Magic Sakura”.

CHALLENGE

We were tasked with creating a social media campaign to engage, inspire and educate users about Japan. Additionally the campaign needed to increase JNTO’s social following and grow the database.

SOLUTION

“Hanami” is the Japanese traditional custom of enjoying the transient beauty of flowers, almost always in reference to those of the cherry blossom tree (Sakura) in spring. Our research showed us that our target audience were within the casual gaming market on Facebook, so we combined these two insights and created an origami inspired HTML5 tamagotchi style mini-game wherein consumers could grow and nurture their very own virtual Japanese Sakura tree as well as learn about popular Japanese culture and travel destinations within Japan. As the tree matures and is kept healthy, mythical Japanese creatures fly through the scene and lanterns appear on its branches for the player to collect and earn points. Collecting 50 lanterns earned the player a chance to win a trip to Japan with a friend, to view the cherry blossoms in real life.

RESULT

Within the first few days of launch we had over 3,000 players organically. We knew instantly we were onto a winner.

As the campaign continued we saw engagement sky rocket with over 31% increase in Facebook fans, 175% increase in engagement on social posts, 11+ million game interactions and a dwell time average of 17+ minutes per session. The fans went crazy for growing their own virtual sakura tree and 85% of players returned to the site. Our winning player picked up a free holiday to Japan to experience Hanami for themselves.

CHALLENGE

Kenya is a rich and diverse holiday destination with many different experiences on offer to Australian travellers. How can we highlight all the different aspects of a holiday in Kenya in a way that resonates with the Australian market?

SOLUTION

We sent 5 influencers to Kenya, each tasked with documenting different product categories that Kenya wanted to highlight: Wildlife, Adventure, Luxury, Culture and Conservation. We then used this content to create 5 themed stories of their experiences, with the public able to enter to win that adventure at the end of each. Our campaign partner, Canon, opened up exposure to an even wider audience.

RESULT

We hit double our target for database growth with more than 50% of traffic to the website from new users and an average bounce rate below 35%. The users loved the campaign and gained a new awareness of the various of experiences on offer from a destination like Kenya.

CHALLENGE

To create a digital/social campaign that creates awareness of Fiji being a place that “will make you happier than anywhere else in the world” whilst driving database growth and an increase in fans across Facebook.

SOLUTION

Born from the insight that sunsets receive unprecedented engagement on social media and Sunset Relaxation Therapy being a proven therapeutic measure to reduce stress, we proposed Fiji SUN-SET.

We invited users to kick back, relax and enjoy a minute of soothing sunsets direct from Fiji. After the minute, they were able to enter to win an all expenses paid trip to visit the shores of the happiest place on earth and see the Fijian sunset for themselves.

THE CHANGE

The campaign yielded huge results, with a reach of over 5.7M, database growth over 115k and a fan boost of +95K.

An incredible 92% of users viewing the microsite went on to enter the competition.

CHALLENGE

When you transit through Changi Airport Singapore, you receive S$40 per person to spend at the Airport. We were tasked with highlighting this incentive programme to the Australian market.

SOLUTION

We created a multi-phase campaign to promote the “Changi Transit Programme” to Australians. The ‘Create A Banknote’ competition invited users to design and ‘put their face’ on a fictitious Changi Airport banknote for their chance to WIN S$10,000 to spend at Changi Airport and two return flights to a destination in Asia of their choice.

Each banknote designed became a stand alone advert for the campaign, including key details on how the Changi Transit Programme works. To incentivise organic spread, users gained additional entries by sharing the campaign with friends over Facebook, Twitter and email.

RESULT

The temptation of putting their face on a banknote and literally ‘printing their own money’ proved a fun fantasy for many Australians.

AWARDS: 2013 Silver W3 Award – Social Content – Social Presence
Featured as best practice social media in Facebook’s official guide for ‘Tourism Boards on Facebook’

IMPACT & OUTCOMES
Visitor arrivals increased 5.3% and tourism earnings increased by 6.6% in 2014
13.8% increase in visitor arrivals in June 2015 compared to June 2014
Consolidated, effective world-class social media and digital marketing ecosystem
Increased Tourism Fiji’s social media followers by 157%
Built an email database from zero to over 74,000 email contacts to leverage for further marketing
Innovative approach using Influencer Marketing developing strong relationships with digital influencers for continued destination exposure
The success of Tourism Fiji’s social media has galvanized support from trade partners, tour operators and other brands to participate in future campaigns
Up-skill of Tourism Fiji in-house staff on social media best practice and innovation through Circul8 led training programs

CHALLENGE

Unified Weapons Master (UWM) is heralded as the next great super sport of our times; the high tech future of weapons based martial arts.

UWM required an integrated social strategy to spread awareness, increase engagement and ultimately gain momentum towards their first live events.

SOLUTION

After a comprehensive audit of UWM’s existing marketing activity, we took ownership of their social channels and implemented a comprehensive strategy that combined each of their owned channels to create a social ecosystem driven by consistent content framework, tone of voice and visual language.